Tag Archives: Medal of Honor

We Need A Common-Sense Immigration Policy

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I don’t support the current immigration bill. Because we currently have an administration that selectively enforces the law, I am afraid that the enforcement parts of the immigration bill will not be enforced. However, we desperately need to revise our immigration laws. One example of bureaucratic nonsense relating to immigration appeared yesterday in the Washington Free Beacon.

The story involves Hafez (a pseudonym to protect his identity), who served as an Afghan translator for Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer during the battle of Ganjgal. Dakota Meyer is the first living Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam war.

The article reports:

But Meyer says his friend Hafez is still waiting to receive a U.S. visa he applied for years ago. The former translator remains in Afghanistan under daily threat from the Taliban while his application is caught in the bureaucratic limbo of the State Department.

“He stood next to me, by my side pretty much the entire time [during the Battle of Ganjgal],” Meyer, 25, said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon on Monday. “He helped me carry my guys out.”

“If we can’t help get this guy back who sacrificed so much to bring these Americans home, I’m sure he’ll be killed,” he said.

As the American presence in Afghanistan decreases, translators have been targeted by the Taliban . We need to grant this man (and his family) political asylum in America as soon as possible. We won’t have anyone in the world willing to help us anywhere if we continue to behave like this.

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Something Is Very Wrong Here

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NBC Connecticut is reporting today that three recipients of the Medal of Honor will present the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s highest civilian award, the Citizen Honors Medal posthumously to the six educators that were killed trying to protect their students in Newtown. Connecticut on December 14th. I think that is wonderful–they are being awarded this medal because they were killed trying to protect their students.

However, there is another group of shooting victims that is being denied the honor they have earned. The Department of Defense is refusing to award the Purple Heart to those soldiers killed on the attack at Fort Hood, Texas.

On April 2, Military.com reported:

A position paper, delivered by the Pentagon to congressional staff members Friday, says giving the award, for injuries sustained in combat, to those injured at Fort Hood could “irrevocably alter the fundamental character of this time-honored decoration.”

If you are attacked at your base and people are killed, isn’t that combat? Admittedly it is unplanned combat, but isn’t a lot of combat unplanned?

The article at Military.com further reports:

Thirteen people were killed and 32 injured in the November 2009 shootings on the base. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the alleged shooter, awaits a military trial on premeditated murder and attempted murder charges.

Fort Hood was a terrorist act–it was not ‘workplace violence.’ Maj. Hasan yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. We are at war–this was an attack by the enemy. We need to acknowledge that and make sure that all the victims of that attack receive the honor and benefits they are entitled to. Meanwhile, we do not hesitate to honor civilians in equally awful situations. Both groups should receive medals in a timely fashion.

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Lost In The Shuffle

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There was a Supreme Court decision issued last Thursday other than the one on Obamacare. The Stolen Valor Act was declared unconstitutional. The Stolen Valor Act was passed in 2006 and signed by President Bush. It made it illegal to claim to have received any U.S. military decoration or medal. If convicted, defendants might have been imprisoned for up to six months, unless the decoration lied about is the Medal of Honor, in which case imprisonment could have been up to one year.

On Thursday, USA Today reported:

The court found that the statute violates the First Amendment.

The decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, says the law, as written, “seeks to control and suppress all false statements on this one subject in almost limitless times and settings without regard to whether the lie was made for the purpose of material gain.”

Kennedy writes that permitting the government to decree this kind of speech as a criminal offense “would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable.”

He notes, however, that Congress might be able to rewrite the law “to achieve the government’s objective in less burdensome ways.”

I understand why the court ruled this way, but falsely claiming military honors needs to be illegal. This is another slap in the face to the military veterans of all past wars who have earned these honors and medals.

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A Hero Who Did What Was Right Rather Than What Was Political

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Picture of the medal of honor

Image via Wikipedia

I am writing this article with very mixed emotions. There are and have been a number of people in my family who serve or have served in the military. In my study of history and listening to stories of veterans going back to World War II, I have learned that many things have changed about the way America fights wars. Not all of these changes are good. It is with that in mind that I write this article.

The source of this article is a Wall Street Journal article from September 16. I am not linking to the article because it is a subscribers only article. I am working from the hard copy (some of us still do read real newspapers!).

On September 15, President Obama presented Sgt. Dakota Meyer with the Medal of Honor. Sgt. Meyer, a Marine, was given the medal for his actions on September 8, 2009. He disobeyed an order to stand firm and went to rescue members of his patrol. In doing this, he saved the lives of 13 Marines and 23 Afghan soldiers.

There are a few aspects of this article that bother me. The article states:

Despite the large Taliban force, U. S. artillery support was denied and helicopter support was late in arriving, as commanders worried they might violate a tactical directive to limit the use of air power when civilians could be injured or killed.

Are the people in charge of our troops so stupid that they believe the Taliban is not aware of this tactical directive and purposely attacks in areas where they know we will not use air power? Would the people in charge of our troops like to meet face to face with the parents and spouses of the people who have been killed as a result of this policy? Diplomacy and war are two separate things–would someone please tell Washington that.

The article further reports:

As the fighting rages, he (Sgt. Meyer) and Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez were ordered to remain with a Humvee outside the battle zone.

“We requested a few times and were denied to come in,” Sgt. Meyer said in a statement released by the Marine Corps. “Finally, we knew what we needed to do and decided we were going to go on in on our own.”

Thank God for the courage of those two men. I am sorry that our military leadership would rather sacrifice our soldiers in the name of public relations than actually win the war.

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